We were comparing notes, my pal Mel and me.
Both of us had recently lost much-loved elderly pets. Both of us had subsequently re-homed adult dogs who, for a variety of reasons, had to find new owners.
And we agreed the upside of the arrangement was that someone else had done the heavy lifting.
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Someone else had been through all those lovely moments spent mopping up stray indoor pee and wondering, with very few expletives deleted, if the pooch in question would ever gets its canine head round the simplest of commands.
The downsides were perhaps predictable. Mel and her husband had gone for a dog who looked a lot like his beloved female predecessor. Which was always going to lead to comparisons which might sometimes prove odious.
Their boy is, temperamentally, not much like the dog he replaced, and that obviously takes some getting used to. It’s much a need to train the owners’ mindset as the new house mate.
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For me, dogs trading places has been less dramatic, though I do seem to have replaced a pooch with a casual attitude to her grub with one who can smell food at two hundred paces regardless of the wind direction.
Not to mention a girl who thinks dog baskets are for wimps when there’s a king size bed to be invaded, should the titular owner make the cardinal error of dropping off in it.
Yet the one thing on which both Mel and I cheerfully agreed was that in a world where some people don’t seem to understand that a dog is not just for lockdown, it’s important to give as many “orphans” as possible a good loving home.
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